Bashiok on Boss Damage Visuals

Posted By: July 29, 2008

Bashiok has returned from ComicCon and blessed us with some D3 forum info. Here he answers a question about showing weapon marks on a boss during the battle.

For boss fights we don’t really want to just start throwing “damage decals” on them. It can very easily be too subtle if you’re fighting a smaller boss or one that has odd geometry to it, and it can also end up that no matter the flavor, style, and cool look to a boss you just end up fighting a big gory mess.

Also we think that we can go a lot further than just simple decals and get something much cooler out of a boss fight. So what we hope to do for at least the bosses where it makes sense is to show more apparent and visually noticeable damage states. Instead of a blood splatter they may actually lose a limb, or a piece or armor, or – like the Thousand Pounder – may transform in some dramatic way changing how the fight progresses. We want to go a lot further than just showing sword slashes and instead use dramatic and noticeable (which can be difficult in a game like this) ways to indicate a boss’ current state.

Speaking of battle damage though, and I don’t think this came across in the gameplay video or any of the screenshots as of yet, but when an enemy dies a critical death it actually drenches your hero in blood if you’re within proximity of the spray. It’s awesome.[/blue]

A moment later he made an addition post to clarify the de-arm-itation comment:

It was just an example I made up, I don’t know if the loss of a limb would actually happen or make sense for a fight.

Add Bashiok’s comment about critical damage to what was said during the WWI Denizens of Diablo panel, and it sounds like we’re going to have a delightfully visceral and rather juicy play experience:

Critical hits are bigger deal in d3 than in the previous Diablo games, so we took all the same visual effects we had for normal damage types, and made them that much louder and bigger for critical strikes. When you kill a monster with critical damage, they literally explode.

With all that hitting happening, you’ll be killing a lot of monsters. We wanted to pump up the player’s sense of impact on monsters. In D3 monsters all die with ragdoll physics, which allows the character to interact with the monsters. Depending on what/how you hit them, monsters die in different ways. You can set up situations to knock them off of ledges, or send them flying out into space.

Comments

that sounds kind of crazy to work in that kind of asymmetrical power structure. who has final say on anything? How do you know if something you did is good or bad?

The quote seems to somewhat over complicate things. from what I’ve heard in the past about blizzard’s game construction style, it’s much more open source and iterative. Everyone working on the game is constantly putting new things in, and then everyone tests them out in the latest build and they modify as needed. Pardo’s quote makes it sound like they’re constructing a skyscraper, and once you put in a piece it’s there forever, since everything above it requires the support. It’s more freeform than that.